Autumn: The City (3 page)

Although he’d decided to turn back if nothing happened, an unpredictable combination of curiosity and morbid fascination coupled with the desperate desire to actually find someone else alive kept Jack moving towards the centre of town. The further he got from his home, the more confident he gradually became but, as he neared the main hub of the city, the full enormity of what had happened was made painfully apparent. The small and insignificant suburb where he had lived had been brutally scarred by what had happened but that had been nothing compared to the city centre. Here, where there were far more tightly packed shops, offices, factories and other buildings the death and destruction appeared immense and unending. Jack was overcome by the magnitude of it all. Nothing seemed to have been left untouched by the silent killer early on Tuesday morning.

Walking down one side of a wide dual carriageway, he finally plucked up enough courage to shout out.

‘Hello,’ he yelled, frightening himself with the volume of his own voice. ‘Hello, is there anybody there?’

Nothing. No surprise. He tried again.

‘Hello…’

He stopped shouting and listened as the echoes of his words reverberated around the desolate city street, bouncing off the walls of lifeless buildings. Now that he seemed to be its only occupant, the world suddenly seemed vast and empty. In the far distance he heard a lone dog bark and howl.

‘Hello…’ he shouted again.

Dejected, he wondered whether it was worth going on. He had left his home with some hope, albeit a minimal amount, but now that had evapourated away to nothing. But how could he possibly be the only one left, he asked himself? Out of millions - possibly billions - of people affected, how could it be that he had survived when the rest of them had fallen and died? Did it have anything to do with where he’d been when it had happened? Did he just have a natural, inbuilt immunity? Was it because he worked nights? Was it something he’d eaten or not eaten? Nothing seemed beyond the realms of possibility anymore.

More pathetic, staggering bodies were all that he could see. Now that his initial fear and uncertainty at being out in the open had subsided, Jack was beginning to feel stronger and less threatened by those bodies which moved. He could see, hear, think and react. They, it seemed, could do nothing more than stumble about aimlessly.

He was getting closer and closer to the heart of the city with every step. Was it safe to go in there? Should he turn back now and head home? The main road gradually narrowed to a single lane in either direction and the sudden closeness of the buildings around him made him feel hemmed in and uneasy. He decided against shouting out again. There were even more bodies up ahead. He managed to walk past them with a new found nonchalance, even plucking up the courage to push one of them out of the way when it staggered randomly into his path.

Jack glanced over to his right where he saw one of the pathetic creatures sitting in the shadows of a shop doorway. He hadn’t seen any of the corpses sitting still before, they seemed to move about constantly. Perhaps this was one that had fallen and died in the doorway where it had remained until now. He stopped and walked a little closer. As he approached the body raised its head and looked up at him, lifting its hands to shield its eyes from the bright autumn sun which had appeared momentarily through an unexpected gap in the heavy cloud cover. The figure in the doorway - a young girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age dressed in a creased and crumpled school uniform - slowly stood up and began to walk towards him. It took the two desperate, frightened individuals a good thirty seconds to realise and fully accept the fact that they had both found another survivor. Moving slowly and with caution at first, the girl broke into a run for the last few meters before wrapping her arms around Jack and sinking to her knees. He crouched down and held her as tightly as he could, as if he’d known her for fifty years and not seen her for ten. He’d finally found someone else alive.

After a few long and emotional seconds of silence, Jack looked around anxiously before taking the girl’s hand in his and leading her towards the nearest building. It was a dental surgery. A cold, dark and small private practice which smelt of dust and decay still tinged with a sterile, antiseptic edge. The two survivors sat down together in a musty waiting room on hard plastic seats, surrounded by three motionless corpses that had been waiting to be seen by the now dead dentist since early Tuesday morning. A nurse was slumped across a counter to their right. The presence of the bodies didn’t seem to matter. Being indoors helped Jack psychologically, regardless of how grim and desolate his new surroundings were.

At first neither survivor knew what to say to the other.

‘I’m Jack…’ he eventually stammered awkwardly.

‘I heard you shouting…’ she began to sob. She shook as she leant against him. The warmth of her body was welcome and reassuring. ‘I didn’t know where you were,’she continued. ‘I heard you but I couldn’t see you and…’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he whispered, stroking her hair and gently kissing the top of her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Have you seen anyone else?’ the girl asked.

‘No-one. What about you?’

She shook her head. Feeling fractionally better and more composed, she pushed herself away from Jack slightly and sat up in her seat. He watched as she wiped her face.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

‘Clare Smith,’ she mumbled.

‘And are you from round here, Clare?’

She shook her head again.

‘No, I live with my mum in Letchworth.’

‘So how did you end up in this part of town?’

‘I’d been stopping at my dad’s this weekend. We didn’t have any school on Monday so I stayed with him an extra day and…’

She stopped talking when the memory of her parents and the recollection of her sudden, unexplained loss came flooding back. She started to cry silently. Jack watched helplessly as a relentless stream of tears ran down her pale cheeks.

‘Look,’ he soothed, trying to make it easier for her, ‘you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. If you want we could just……’

‘What happened?’ she asked suddenly, cutting across him and turning to look him square in the face for the first time. ‘What did this?’

Jack sighed, stood up and stepped over a corpse lying at his feet.

‘Don’t know,’ he replied, looking through a frosted-glass window into a small office area. ‘I was on my way home when it happened. I didn’t see anything until it was too late.

Clare leant forward in her seat and held her head in her hands.

‘Dad was driving me to school,’ she said quietly as she stared down at the floor between her feet. ‘He lives right on the other side of town so we were coming through the city centre………’ She paused to wipe her eyes and clear her throat. ‘We pulled up at a set of traffic lights and Dad started to choke. I tried to help him but there was nothing I could do. We drove into the car in front and the car behind hit us. Dad just kept coughing and shaking until he died and I couldn’t do anything…’

Clare’s composure cracked and she lost control again. Jack took a few steps closer to her and knelt down in front of her chair. She grabbed hold of him tightly and pulled herself towards him, burying her face in his chest. Still feeling a little awkward and unsure, he put his arms around her again and rocked her gently.

‘Come on…’ he soothed.

Clare wiped her eyes and continued to talk between heavy sobs.

‘I got out of the car to try and get some help for Dad. I didn’t even stop to think about what had happened to him. And when I got out I couldn’t believe what I saw. Everything had stopped. We were stuck in the middle of the biggest crash you’ve ever seen. It looked like there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars all smashed into each other. I had to climb over them to get to the side of the road…’

‘It happened so quickly that no-one had time to react,’ Jack mumbled. After a few long seconds of silent reflection he cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘I’ve been heading into the centre of town,’ he explained. ‘I live out in the suburbs. I thought I might find a few more people that had survived round here.’

‘And you haven’t found anyone?’ Clare asked. Jack shook his head.

‘You’re the first.’

‘So why have we survived?’

‘No idea. I don’t know anything more than you do. I mean, I was just sitting on the bus trying to get home and…

He stopped talking suddenly.

‘And what…?’ Clare pressed.

‘Shh…’ he hissed, lifting a finger to his lips. He could hear something. He stood up and walked out of the waiting room, beckoning Clare to follow close behind. A twisting wooden staircase led from the ground floor up to the rest of the dental surgery. At the very top of the staircase were three doors leading to separate consulting rooms. Jack cautiously pushed the nearest door open. It swung forward, opening into a small square room dominated by a large treatment chair complete with dead patient. A dental nurse’s corpse lay at his feet. On the other side of the room the lethargic body of a dentist - wearing once hygienic white overalls covered with dribbles of blood - was trapped, its path blocked by the chair and an upturned cupboard of medical equipment. The corpse staggered helplessly from side to side.

‘Let’s go,’ Jack said under his breath. He turned and led Clare downstairs and back out onto the street.

Almost a hundred feet above the city centre Donna watched the world around her begin to decay.

Although she constantly felt anxious, nauseous and ready to break into a nervous panic at any moment, she somehow managed to maintain a surprising degree of control and, generally, was able to continue to think and act relatively rationally and sensibly. She wondered whether it was because she was in the place where she used to work? She had become used to switching off and detaching herself from her emotions in this grey and oppressive environment. In the same way she’d spent the last few weeks and months here processing work, she now found herself having to process the remains of her life. Had she been at home with its comfort, familiarity and memories she felt sure her emotions would have overtaken her by now.

Hunger and other more rudimentary needs had eventually forced her from the training room at the far end of the tenth floor of the office block. Locked in a cabinet that she had smashed her way into in the building manager’s office on the ground floor, she had found a collection of safety lamps and torches. She presumed they would have been used in the event of an emergency or an evening evacuation of the building perhaps. She added the lamps from downstairs to the collection of lighting equipment she’d already gathered and, slowly and methodically, she spaced them around the windows on the tenth floor, eventually managing to work her way around three-quarters of the perimeter of the building.

There was a new found purpose to her actions.

Just after six o’clock, when the evening light began to fade away noticeably, she lit every last lamp and switched on every torch. Her plan was simple. She was desperate to find other survivors but she was also too scared and uncertain to go outside and look for them. She guessed that anyone else left alive in the city would probably feel the same. She decided that the most sensible thing she could do would be to let the rest of the world know where she was hiding.

In the otherwise utter blackness of the cold and lifeless night, the lights in the windows of the office block lit up her location like a beacon.

It worked.

Paul Castle, a music shop sales assistant in his early twenties, was painfully hungry but had been too afraid to leave the store where he had worked and where he’d watched customers and colleagues die in agony last Tuesday morning. He’d searched the entire store and, until now, had been able to find enough scraps to eat and drink from the vending machines dotted around the building. He’d known all along that going outside was inevitable, but he’d done all that he could to prevent it from happening for as long as possible. Now he knew he had no choice but to leave.

Paul waited until the world was dark before venturing out. He figured that the darkness should offer him some protection from the wandering bodies that he had watched staggering aimlessly up and down the desolate streets outside. He knew that in their present state they didn’t seem to actually pose a threat to him, but the additional camouflage that the blackness of the night provided brought him some welcome comfort and reassurance. As long as he managed to avoid dwelling on the fact that these awkward and unpredictable figures had laid dead at his feet for the best part of two days before rising again, he was just about able to keep his fragile emotions in check. In the shadows and low light of early evening it was somehow easier to ignore the desperate condition of the rest of the world. From across the street a staggering dead body looked almost the same as someone who was still alive and who still possessed control, coordination and independence of thought. He had seen more than enough drunkards, addicts and down-and-outs in the city centre at night to be able to convince himself that what he was seeing now was just more of the same. Despite his fear and uncertainty, his comparative speed and agility made it possible for him to move among the bodies as if they were normal people trapped in a bizarre slow motion replay of their lives.

There was little in the way of supermarkets and food stores in the city centre. This was a place where people had worked and shopped for gifts and luxuries, where they had studied and partied and where they had been entertained in cinemas, theatres and clubs. Paul quickly ran down a long concrete ramp close to where he had worked and then turned right and sprinted across the road in the direction of a newsagents and a high-class department store where he knew he would find a well stocked food-hall.